Signs of Life

5 Reasons

Social Justice for Babies Comes in a Cardboard Box

Marcus Harrison Green

Photo by Kela / Annika Söderblom

In 1938, the Finnish government presented a gift to impoverished expectant mothers: a box. This gift would transform parenting in the Scandinavian nation. Measuring roughly 27.5 inches long, 17 inches wide, and 10.5 inches tall, each box contained a sturdy mattress and essentials for the first few months of infancy: blankets, clothing, pacifiers, and bibs. Today, the boxes are showing up all over the world, representing much more than a collection of baby items.

1. Boxes provide a safe sleep space

Baby boxes are more than cutesy cardboard containers: They contribute to safe sleep. The Finnish government extended the baby box program to all mothers in 1949. Prior to the box program, 65 out of 1,000 babies died within the first year of birth. Today, Finland’s infant mortality rate is 2.52 deaths per 1,000 births.

Of course, improved medical care accounted for much of that change. But studies suggest that the box has also played a critical role as it provides a safe sleep space for infants, a fact not lost on American doctors.

U.S. pediatricians and advocacy groups are pushing hospitals to give away the cardboard cribs to help reduce America’s infant death rate: 5.87 deaths per 1,000 births — the highest of any wealthy nation.

According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the safest sleep environment for babies is sleeping alone on a firm surface without blankets, pillows, or loose bedding. The baby box provides that, and officials in Texas recently decided to pursue using baby boxes to help curb an increase in cases of sudden infant death syndrome. According to data from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, in 2015, 159 infants died in circumstances involving sharing a bed with a parent or sibling. University Hospital in San Antonio introduced the boxes in 2015 to address that problem.

Initially, the hospital provided boxes to 100 new mothers. The boxes proved popular, and the hospital ordered 500 more to fulfill the demand of parents-to-be.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the King County Public Health Department has begun distributing baby boxes to needy families who don’t have a safe place for an infant to sleep. And several South Asian nonprofits have introduced a version of the box called the “Barakat Bundle.” This version contains additional items — including antiseptics, sterile razor blades, and other equipment to ensure a hygienic delivery — to address the fact that many women have limited access to maternity care. More than a third of the 5 million infant deaths worldwide occur in the region.

What’s in the Box?

Photo by Kela / Annika Söderblom

Kela, Finland’s social security agency, sends mothers-to-be maternity packages, which include a cardboard box, mattress, and the following items:

A full wardrobe

Warm winter wear

A sleeping bag

Bibs and other linens

Toys and a book

Personal care items

Washable diapers

2. Boxes are eco-friendly

Once an infant outgrows the box (usually at 8 or 9 months), the box and its nontoxic foam mattress can be recycled or reused, instead of ending up in a landfill.

“The philosophy behind the boxes is saving lives, but it’s also about what kind of world we are leaving them,” says Jennifer Clary, co-founder of The Baby Box Co., believed to be the only baby box manufacturer in the United States.

Clary says that environmentalism factors heavily into her company’s decisions, down to the ink and glue used in producing the boxes. She says both are certified nontoxic and environmentally safe.

Concerns about pollution are not just for the environment, but for the babies themselves. A report by the President’s Cancer Panel stated that babies are born “prepolluted” — exposed to some 200 chemicals in the womb.

Doctors suggest this increases the risk of developing diseases such as cancer later in life.

3. Boxes demonstrate support

“It says that all babies start at the same spot and that the community cares about you,” she says.

Selassie, who had her first child at 19, said she suffered firsthand the stigma that comes with being an unwed pregnant teen. The experience inspired her to establish her organization in 2015 after reading a BBC article about Finland’s program.

For Selassie, now 37, the boxes are as much about intangible benefits as about the items inside.

Teen moms often see the boxes as a desperately needed symbol of support. Whatever the circumstances of a woman’s pregnancy, Selassie said, she gets her box without judgment or contempt, a welcome contrast from what many experience while pregnant.

Her organization gave away 54 boxes in 2015. Some recipients had no one to help them during their transition to motherhood, says Selassie.

“The mothers are so grateful to have such a show of community support for their children,” she says.

The nonprofit recently distributed boxes at a Minneapolis homeless shelter to pregnant teens, many of whom cried when they lifted the lid to discover the supplies.

Babies Need Boxes also connects teen mothers with service providers such as housing and employment agencies.

The organization plans to hand out 500 more boxes this year.

Prior to the box program, 65 out of 1,000 babies died within the first year of birth. Today, Finland’s infant mortality rate is 2.52 deaths per 1,000 births.

4. Boxes provide supplies to those in need

Baby boxes have long provided a head start in child-rearing for Finnish mothers: Supporting needy families was one of the original reasons behind Finland’s maternity box program.

It was a way to ensure Finnish babies an “equal start in life,” regardless of background, a goal established by the Finnish government in light of the high infant death rate among poor families.

At first, those receiving boxes were required to verify their need. In 1949, legislation stemming from public-health concerns made them available to all pregnant mothers.

The boxes have become so ingrained in Finnish culture that 95 percent of parents accept the box even though they can decline it for a cash payment of 140 euros.

“The boxes really take a lot of stress off of mothers,” says Joy Johnson of Simpson Housing Services, a Minneapolis nonprofit that distributes baby boxes to homeless women.

Johnson says the supplies alleviate the financial pressure many new mothers face when trying to provide items for a newborn.

The poorest are the ones who benefit the most, according to Johnson.

“Poor mothers have a hard time finding a safe place for their babies to sleep at times,” says Johnson.

Without baby boxes, Johnson says, many of Simpson Housing’s clientele would make makeshift cribs out of air mattresses or a pile of blankets on the floor.

“Rich or poor, they make the process of having a baby enjoyable,” she adds.

5. Boxes are democratic

True to the egalitarian principles associated with their Scandinavian heritage, baby boxes distributed in Finland cut across socio-economic lines.

Affluent and impoverished families alike receive the same box. To many Finns, this government gift accentuates the collective value placed on family and equality. The country has no private schools, was the first in the world to give women the right to vote, and has the lowest economic inequality of any European Union member.

Clary, of The Baby Box Co., estimates that 75 percent of her company’s business comes from hospitals, local governments, or nonprofits that give away the boxes, regardless of income.

“A baby box is for any parent, rich or poor,” she says.

They also send a symbolic message: In the eyes of a community, all babies matter.

People We Love

Funny Thing, Gender Justice

Alexa Strabuk

Kristina Wong

Combating stereotypes as performance art

Kristina Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American performance artist, breaks the mold for a living. She’s a culture jammer, using comedy to breach the confines of the theater by taking it to the streets. Based in Los Angeles, Wong has a number of interventions under her belt. She’s crashed the Miss Chinatown USA Pageant, created a fake mail-order bride website, and initiated a Kickstarter campaign to marry Jeremy Lin.

Her work challenges preconceived beauty standards, the misrepresentation of Asian- and Pacific Islander-Americans as perpetual foreigners, and the stereotypes surrounding the “model minority.” For Wong, performance art lies somewhere in the gray area between theater and comedy. “For some people, they have a hard time with my work because they’re like, ‘Is she serious?’ or ‘Why does she want my money?’ or ‘Is she really like that?’” Wong teaches the audience how to watch her show; it’s about setting up a different framework that eliminates projected falsehoods about her and her identity. Rather than creating work that comes from an angry, reactive place, she believes that laughing at oppression is more powerful. “If you react with the same anger that has been thrust on you, it’s like the man has gotten you twice.”

Sam Killermann

Manipulating privilege to be a platform

Sam Killermann is outcome-oriented: What his audience does after the show matters the most. Killermann lives in Austin, Texas, and works as an interdisciplinary comedian—he’s written books, drawn graphics, performed at live shows, and given lectures. He exists in the social justice world and in the comedy one, using humor to make otherwise difficult or overwhelming conversations palatable. “I take the Mary Poppins approach. I think a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down,” he says.

His show, “It’s Pronounced Metrosexual,” centers on snap judgments, the cycle of oppression, and Milton Bennett’s Platinum Rule. He describes himself as a “pretty man,” whose sexuality people often misunderstand. To be clear: Killermann is a straight, White, non-disabled man. He is under no illusions about his privilege; rather, he wants to amplify the voices of those who are often out of the spotlight. Gender, he explains, is one of the primary lenses through which we see the world. By deconstructing false notions of gender in relation to sexuality, Killermann provides the tools and resources that push his audience to think. Existing labels and associations just won’t cut it anymore.

D'Lo

Transcending identity through storytelling

“Is that a girl who looks like a man or a boy that looks better than my man?” The crowd erupts; the show has started. D’Lo’s bio lists him as a writer, actor, and comedian. He’s also Transgender Queer and a Tamil-Sri Lankan American — but he is all of those things in no particular order, transcending those identities through performance. His work covers a range of topics, serious and light. “I’m just trying to create work that speaks to the political climate we’re living in. I’m interested in power dynamics that hit on all different aspects of society,” explains D’Lo, who’s based in Los Angeles.

All of the descriptors listed in his bio distinguish him, but do not define him. The job, first and foremost, is to make people laugh. By being himself and telling his story, he resonates with those who dare to question the way things are. Most people have never thought about life from a person of color’s perspective, or from a genderqueer perspective, and D’Lo uses his hour-long spotlight to smash assumptions. “Nobody really knows anybody. I put out my identity all day long, and yet I’m going to be onstage talking about stuff that you’ve never heard before.”

A Quiet Walk with 1,500-year-old Birds and Bears

Terry Tempest Williams

YES! Illustration by Julie Notarianni

There is a great bird resting in the woodlands above the great river with marching bears behind her. A seasoned peace that can only belong to the prairie creates the path on the ridgetop where she can be found. Time — not blood — is the life force animating the bird and these bears. Some 1,500 years ago, these earth mounds were made by the hands of the people who lived here in the Upper Mississippi Valley, ancestors to today’s Ho-Chunk people, also known as the Winnebago. This is the “Driftless Area” where the glacial sheets of ice that stretched across the North American continent during the Pleistocene fell short of this holy site. A Ho-Chunk woman would see these figures through the gestures of ceremony: the burying of the dead; the honoring of birds and bears. As a visitor, I experience this land as a walking meditation.

This is an excerpt from The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams. The book is available in June from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Terry Tempest Williams is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar for Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a writer who divides her time between Utah and Wyoming. She is the author of several books.

Effigy Mounds National Monument is a quiet space of contemplation in the northeast corner of Iowa where the Mississippi River creates a fluid boundary with southern Wisconsin. For millennia, tens of thousands of these earth mounds dotted the Midwestern territory of what we now know as the United States. Archaeologists have documented 23 different shapes of effigy mounds. But Manifest Destiny plowed them under in favor of fields of corn. Now very few remain in a landscape that has been transformed by industrial agriculture. Still, within Effigy Mounds National Monument there are 207 mounds, 56 of them effigies in the shape of animals.

Most of the round mounds are believed to be burial sites housing the bones of men, women, and children who belonged to particular communities. Some burials contain bundles of bones, some charred, some dusted with red ocher. Other mounds have contained “flesh burials” where the body has remained intact. Artifacts such as Clovis points have been found nearby along with those that surprise, like a copper breastplate with twine made from basswood. Other mounds shaped from the earth are long, like a string of pearls stretched along the ridges, while others rise from the woodland floor in the shapes of birds and bears, possibly wolves, most with a view of the Mississippi River.

We approached each mound as a prayer. Death, yes, as a gathering place, writes the poet Jorie Graham in her poem, “WE.” Death, yes, honored in a seasonal pilgrimage that perhaps was the end point of a journey taken to remember one’s ancestors. To visit any grave is a solemn practice. To visit these mounds is to be brought into the presence of an unseen force where the ground has literally been raised.

To visit any grave is a solemn practice. To visit these mounds is to be brought into the presence of an unseen force where the ground has literally been raised.

Brooke and I rise before dawn the next morning. The creek bed is dry. We are walking on an old roadbed that cuts through a mature forest of red oaks. Cicadas begin their rasping chorus like an electrical current plugged in at sunrise. Diffused light follows us up the steep incline to the top of the ridge where it opens wide to a restored prairie dense with bee balm, sumac, and black-eyed Susans. Black swallowtails waft among the pale purple coneflowers. When we come to a stand of aspens, we face an eruption of birds: rose-breasted grosbeaks, redstarts, catbirds, yellow warblers, and vireos joined by chickadees, house wrens, flickers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. It is a charged place. We are drawn to a small path that veers right from the main trail. There in the shadowed woods is a circular mound covered in ferns. Neither Brooke nor I speak, but stand silently inside a cacophony of birdsong.

Back on the main trail, we follow deer tracks to another large stand of aspens where a first-year summer tanager confounds us. We were unfamiliar with its marbled plumage, red-yellow. With Albert’s map in mind, we turn left down a mowed pathway wet with dew. Large ferns flirt with us, brushing against our legs as mourning cloaks and tortoiseshells float above the grasses. It is lush country. We descend into shadows overtaken by stillness. There, in a shaded clearing, are two mounds with a monarch butterfly hovering over them. Brooke and I separate.

I do not recognize the shape of this particular effigy until I draw it with my feet. Its edge is distinct, a contrast between what has been mowed and what has not. The tall grasses suggest fur. After one full rotation, the vegetative body of ferns and forbs lets me know I have walked the contours of a small bear. I slowly walk the path surrounding the small bear twice. With the breezes, the body of the bear breathes.

From the vantage point of an eagle, 10 bear effigies march down the spine of this mountain in single file. We walk among them in silence. What was the impulse behind their creation? Love? Respect? A rising up of the relationship between humans and animals? Some say there are wolves and snakes among them. On the other side of the mountain, the green shuddering of fields registers as a single note of corn.

Continuing down the path, the glare of the Mississippi River shines through the spaces between sugar maples and hickories as it meanders below. The temperature feels cooler, the shadows deeper. Suddenly, with a white oak as my witness, the energy of the woods shifts — in the clearing is the Bird.

I do not recognize the shape of this particular effigy until I draw it with my feet... I slowly walk the path surrounding the small bear twice. With the breezes, the body of the bear breathes.

I stopped to see the winged effigy in its entirety. Falcon enters my mind, swift and swerving. What if the wind I have been hearing was the memory of flight? This bird made of earth glimmers as light dances on the leaves, and I want to touch her body, a garden, but I don’t. Restraint is its own prayer. The fact that a brilliant red-headed woodpecker flew down from an oak branch, landing where the raptor’s heart would be, only made the moment more miraculous.

For the rest of the afternoon, I walk the effigy’s wings into motion. They say her wingspan is over 200 feet long. For me, her wings span time where the whispering of Holy Wisdom can be heard.

Great Bird above the Great River, what would you have us know?

This is an excerpt from The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams. The book is available in June from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Terry Tempest Williams is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar for Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a writer who divides her time between Utah and Wyoming. She is the author of several books.

Celebrate the Urban Wilderness Right Where You Live

Shelley McEuen

Photo by Shelley McEuen, Illustration by YES! Magazine

LaMar Orton apologizes. The soft-spoken, sprightly 71-year-old has interrupted himself again to curiously pause and inspect — a wild rose, the symmetry of the surrounding cliffs, a puncture vine along the trail, a healthy specimen of poison ivy.

Shelley McEuen is an English professor at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls. She is pursuing a doctorate in ecocriticism and narrative theory.

Walking through Rock Creek Canyon, Orton remembers his days as a city planner when this urban canyon was full of trash: junked autos, defunct washing machines, and tons of discarded tires and other refuse. “The idea that these wild areas are some place to dump stuff off has been around for a long time,” he says, shaking his head.

Orton also knows Rock Creek’s waters, which begin in the hills south of Twin Falls, pass through a smattering of farms, cattle ranches, and recreation areas, wind through the city and Rock Creek Park, and eventually empty into the Snake River. All this exists just blocks from the commercial center of downtown Twin Falls. “One reason I became enchanted with this place is that downtown is up there,” Orton explains, pointing to the canyon rim above, “but it is a totally different feel down here.”

To be inside Rock Creek Canyon is to hear birds, not traffic — it is to feel distinctly elsewhere. Three unmarked entrances and just one kitschy wagon-wheel sign mark Rock Creek’s walking trail and connected park below. Eighty-foot-deep basalt canyon walls frame the view of the 4-mile-long paved trail system, running mostly along the creek under a canopy of Russian olive, elm, ash, and cottonwood trees. Through this jagged swath of canyon cutting through southern Idaho’s Twin Falls County run mule deer, raccoons, Northern flickers, jays, Western tanagers, and yellow-bellied marmots.

Photo by Shelley McEuen, Illustration by YES! Magazine

While the initial cleanup efforts in the 1970s left the canyon looking pristine, upon closer scrutiny, Rock Creek Canyon tells a far different story. Rock Creek is emblematic of a common environmental problem: an urban wild space neglected by local residents who advocate protecting such spaces elsewhere. Here in Twin Falls, many people ignore Rock Creek but are eager to drive 40 miles south to the Shoshone Basin region, or 75 miles north to the Sun Valley area for hiking, mountain biking, and skiing.

Revitalization efforts to bring about change in neglected urban wild areas, watersheds in particular, can be seen throughout the country. The Spokane River, running directly through Spokane, Washington, still has some of the highest levels of pollution in the state, despite the addition of the beautiful Riverfront Park. Frankford Creek in Philadelphia suffers from outdated sewer pipes and storm water overflow, but the city is undergoing a long-term plan to broadly improve its infrastructure. And the Patapsco River in Baltimore is one of several waterways where volunteers are encouraged to participate in “Canoe and Scoop” days to help clean up the impaired Chesapeake Watershed. Then there is the famous Los Angeles River, where an ambitious comprehensive plan exists to remove concrete channels and restore the natural riparian areas running through the city.

Revitalization efforts to bring about change in neglected urban wild areas can be seen throughout the country.

The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality has declared Rock Creek “impaired,” meaning its water is too polluted for “beneficial” uses such as swimming and fishing. Runoff from agriculture upstream combines with the effects of recreational use, industrial effluent, and a number of unmapped septic systems discharging directly to the creek. Graffiti regularly appears on the foundations of the three bridges spanning the canyon, and trash lingers under Old Towne Bridge, a throwback to the days of Rock Creek as city dump. Many residents call the canyon a “working creek.”

So when it comes time to get outdoors, many of those same residents head out of town.

Erica Pfister and family have been traveling to the Sun Valley area for the past six years to hike, bike, and ski. “It’s just so accessible,” Pfister explains. The area has plenty of trails, natural beauty, and restaurant options, she adds, which makes the more-than-hour-long drive north worth it. “It’s so pretty up there, and you can see wildlife — you feel like you really are in the middle of nature,” she says.

According to The Nature Conservancy in Idaho, each year an estimated 300 to 500 residents of the Twin Falls area travel the roughly 60 miles to Silver Creek Preserve, a pristine location with Nature Conservancy protection and some of the most coveted fishing waters in the United States. During the summer months, heavy traffic out of Twin Falls clogs the roads to the Shoshone Basin and the Boulder-White Cloud Wilderness.

This dichotomy is one that noted environmental historian William Cronon discusses in his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Cronon takes issue with wilderness as a human construct, resulting in a conceptual divide between an idealized, distant wilderness and other wild spaces such as those existing in communities and backyards.

Restoring Rock Creek Canyon requires altering community perceptions and attitudes. It also raises the question: Can a place shake its history?

As long as wilderness is an ideal that exists someplace else, residents may feel absolved of responsibility to steward the wild spaces within their own communities. In Twin Falls, industrious visionaries in the late 1880s transformed the southern Idaho desert into its regional nickname, the Magic Valley. Until 1960, Rock Creek Canyon served as a city sewer run, emptying directly into the Snake River. Factories also moved in, dumping post-production effluent into the creek. Three factories remain on the canyon rim: one meat processing plant and two vegetable/potato processors. These factories cement a connection between business and creek, a familiar story associated with American industrial expansion.

However, changes may be on the horizon for Rock Creek Canyon. The Magic Valley Trail Enhancement Committee (MaVTEC), organized in 2007, has been working to create trails and connect existing ones throughout the area. With the group’s primary goal of the Snake River Canyon Rim Trail almost complete, director Jaime Tigue says efforts will shift toward Rock Creek Canyon, enhancing trail usability while raising public awareness and interest.

Photo by Shelley McEuen, Illustration by YES! Magazine

“Rock Creek has been on our radar for a long time,” says Tigue. “It’s such an important asset to this community that often gets overlooked.” MaVTEC is exploring options for purchasing privately owned property that separates two current Rock Creek Canyon trails. The committee hopes to join the trails, eventually connecting them with the now separate Snake River Canyon Rim Trail.

MaVTEC’s work represents a potential paradigm shift: a community focusing on utilizing, preserving, and enjoying the natural spaces within its urban environment. Dayna Gross, senior conservation manager for The Nature Conservancy in Idaho, says this shift is part of the organization’s new mission — working with natural urban areas while embodying “respect for people, communities, and cultures.” Gross sees this hybrid of wild spaces and humanity as a new vision — conservation that acknowledges a broader definition of preservation, including the wild spaces we live within, in addition to those “out there.”

Restoring Rock Creek Canyon requires altering community perceptions and attitudes. It also raises the question: Can a place shake its history? This call for change is universal — community neighbors must begin looking deeply at the core values framing everyday lives. As nurturing wild urban spaces becomes part of the community fabric, the separation between the natural and human-made may begin to dissolve, and a new definition of progress, prosperity, and preservation may emerge. Acting in this consciousness today is to begin — right exactly where we find ourselves.

Shelley McEuen is an English professor at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls. She is pursuing a doctorate in ecocriticism and narrative theory.

The Page That Counts

The Numbers That Define Our World

Keith Barbalato & Kate Stringer

Average cost of a losing campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2012 $540,022 1

Average cost of a winning campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2012 $1,567,379

Average cost of a losing campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, 2012 $7,434,819

Average cost of a winning campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, 2012 $11,474,362

Median number of paid vacation days in Germany 30 2

Median number of paid vacation days in the United States 15

Median number of paid vacation days left unused by people in Germany 0

Median number of paid vacation days left unused by people in the United States 4

Total miles driven in the United States, 2014 3.136 trillion 3

Extra hours the average American rush-hour commuter wasted due to congested traffic, 2014 42 4

Cost of congestion in wasted time and fuel, 2014 $160 billion

Percentage of eighth-graders proficient in math, 2015 33 5

Average pay per hour of those with bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers $35 6

Average pay per hour of those with bachelor’s degrees in non-STEM careers $28

U.S. federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, 2012 $146 million 7

Arts and cultural productions’ contribution to the U.S. economy, 2012 $698 billion 8

Average cost of normal delivery of a baby in the United States $10,002 9

Average cost of normal delivery of a baby in the Netherlands $2,824

The United States’ ranking out of 179 countries on the 2015 Mothers’ Index, which measures
the well-being of mothers and their children 33 10

The Netherlands’ ranking out of 179 countries on the 2015 Mothers’ Index 6

Number of times Geoff Barrow’s music was streamed, 2015 34 million 11

Money he earned that year for total streams, after tax $2,407

Age group in the United Kingdom that reports highest level of happiness 65–79 12

Age group in the United Kingdom that reports lowest level of happiness 45–59

1.Center For Responsive Politics 2. Expedia 3. U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration 4. Texas A&M Transportation Institute 5. The National Assessment of Educational Progress 6. U.S. Department of Commerce 7. National Endowment for the Arts Appropriations History 8. National Endowment for the Arts Appropriations Request For Fiscal Year 2016 9. International Federation of Health Plans 10. Save The Children 11. Geoff Barrow 12. U.K. Office of National Statistics